An Open Letter to the Libertarian National Committee
The Libertarian National Committee can, should, and must remove Chase Oliver as the 2024 Presidential Nominee of the Libertarian Party.
Preamble
On Sunday, May 26, 2024, Chase Oliver became the Libertarian Party’s nominee for the 2024 Presidential Race. That nomination is procedurally valid, and nothing written here would challenge that procedural validity. The 2024 Libertarian National Convention, for all its chaos, was held in good order, under the bylaws of the Libertarian Party, and its results are not subject to any legitimate challenge. As it was composed in the waning hours of Sunday, the delegation nominated Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat.
According to the Libertarian Party’s bylaws, “The National Committee shall respect the vote of the delegates at nominating conventions and provide full support for the Party’s nominee for President and nominee for Vice-President as long as their campaigns are conducted in accordance with the platform of the Party” (Libertarian Party Bylaws, Article 14§4). No Libertarian Presidential campaign in my adult life has successfully campaigned in accordance with the platform. Gary Johnson publicly advocated for a Christian baker’s right to free association to be infringed in favor of a gay couple seeking a custom wedding cake. Jo Jorgensen expressed support for a post-Marxist identitarian movement making claims for collective “justice.” These candidates’ nominations were not suspended.
Nonetheless, under Article 14§5, the LNC could have validly suspended those campaigns by a ¾ vote of the entire Committee, citing those public contradictions of the platform as a candidate. Their choice not to do so was one of political calculation; Mr. Johnson and Ms. Jorgensen were good, though imperfect, libertarians, and every single Libertarian knows that he is the One True Libertarian. The LNCs of 2012, 2016, and 2020 made the judgment call that, while Mr. Johnson and Ms. Jorgensen were flawed, their campaigns would serve as a net positive for the liberty movement; therefore, they did not exercise their right under 14§5. It is time now for precedent to be set.
Can
Since becoming the nominee, Chase Oliver has publicly adopted and advocated for positions which are in contradiction of the LP Platform, Plank 1.5, which reads:
1.5 Parental Rights
Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs, provided that the rights of children to be free from abuse and neglect are also protected.
Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs, provided that the rights of children to be free from abuse and neglect are also protected.
When Mr. Oliver is asked questions regarding the prospect of prepubescent children being given hormonal drugs that prevent the natural progression of puberty, as a “treatment” for so-called “gender dysphoria,” he responds that he supports “parents meeting with their doctor to determine the best healthcare decisions for their kids on a case-by-case basis.” He claims that puberty blockers are “mostly” reversible, and that it is wrong for anyone to interfere in that process to (as I would phrase it) protect the child from abuse.
Puberty blockers are not reversible, or even “mostly” reversible. They have a permanent effect, to an extent determined by the duration of use. Puberty is the natural process by which human beings develop from children into adolescents and then adults who are physically able to engage with human sexuality and all the complexity that arises therefrom. It is not a process which can be placed on pause like a movie. If a child is put on puberty blockers from the age of 12 to 14, he will never go through the parts of puberty that would normally have occurred in that time period.
I like to compare it to a construction project. A series of crews is scheduled to build a house. On Monday, the digging crew levels the site; on Tuesday, the concrete crew lays the foundation; on Wednesday, the framers come; on Thursday, electricians and plumbers do their work; on Friday, flooring and drywall experts fill out the interior. If you keep the digging and concrete crews out on Monday and Tuesday, they won’t come back on Wednesday and Thursday; the framers are coming on Wednesday, and they’re going to try and fail to build a solid frame. Bringing this back to the context of human puberty, this means that the body will try and fail to build on steps which were previously not taken, leading to a malformed body that is neither fully adult nor still a child. The better term for “puberty blockers” is “chemical castration,” as demonstrated by the fact that Lupron, a “puberty blocker,” is also sometimes forcibly given to convicted violent sex offenders in order to destroy their sexual processes so that they do not reoffend.
Children are physically incapable of understanding human sexuality. Puberty is the process by which their minds and bodies develop that capacity. This is why it is one of the worst crimes imaginable to engage with a child sexually: Children Cannot Consent. To claim that it is possible for a parent and a doctor to decide together that a child should be chemically castrated is to claim that children are able to consent in sexual matters. Even Mr. Oliver understands this, I believe, because he is opposed to the practice of surgically mutilating children’s sexual organs, including circumcision (Based). Therefore, by advocating that parents and doctors may decide to chemically castrate children, Chase has opposed the notion that children have a right to be free from abuse.
Because he has, while the Libertarian Candidate for President, advanced a position which contradicts Libertarian Party Platform Plank 1.5, the Libertarian National Committee has sufficient grounds on which to suspend Chase Oliver’s candidacy by a ¾ vote of the entire Committee.
Should
The Libertarian Party is strongest at the local level. City councils, county commissions, mayoralties and sheriff’s offices are our bread and butter, where we can take real action to defend Americans’ natural rights from the predations of the US Federal Government. When the LNC thinks about our national candidates, you should do so with that in mind; improving our vote share in the presidential elections is less important than getting local candidates over the line to take office.
Chase Oliver does not help our local candidates. His messaging is at best tepid, and at worst actively harmful to local campaigns. Look to my own race for an example. I am the Libertarian Nominee for US House, Idaho 1st District. In my district, I hear constantly about 3 issues: Immigration, Inflation, and Trans Kids. On immigration and inflation, Oliver’s positions do me no harm, and are sometimes even helpful. However, nothing gets quite as emotional as the topic of Trans Kids.
Parents and grandparents care deeply about their children and grandchildren. They want to see their lines continued into the future and their descendants living happy, productive, fruitful lives. When they see government schools, federal departments, and corporate propaganda pushing what the so-called “LGBTQ+ Movement” is advocating, they respond with horror. When they see the same message, cloaked in libertarian jargon, echoed by this party’s presidential nominee, it is a struggle to prevent them from dismissing us outright. Everyone outside an ideologically captured fringe recognizes that, no matter your position on adult sexuality, Children Cannot Consent.
Mr. Oliver’s flaws can turn into a win for the Libertarian Party and our local candidates. You can and should put this issue to rest, to earn us all credibility in the eyes of the normal Americans we are trying to recruit to fight for liberty. Your down-ballot candidates need your help. As the great Dave Casey said recently, “If the LNC doesn’t understand that chemical castration of children is the most egregious NAP violation imaginable, then pack it up.”
Must
Let’s talk inside baseball.
It is no secret that the Libertarian Party has a major factional split. While a supermajority of this LNC was endorsed by the Mises Caucus at the 2024 Convention, the votes were extremely close for many positions, and the “Prag” alliance of the Classical Liberal Caucus and the Radical Caucus endorsed the winning candidates for President, Vice President, Vice Chair and Treasurer. Many state affiliates are largely run by the Mises Caucus, some are run by CLC or Rads, and some few are able to function with mixed boards. Regardless of what happens in the 2024 Presidential race, the 2026 Convention in Grand Rapids is set up to be as contentious as our national conventions have been since 2018.
We can also recognize the reality that regardless of whom the Libertarian Party has on the ballot for the 2024 Presidential race, we will not win. There are three people who have any chance to be sworn in on January 20, 2025, and their names are Joe, Don, and Bob. The position of Presidential Nominee is one of spreading the message, recruiting for the movement, and bringing Libertarians together to fight for what victories we can attain for liberty. Chase Oliver will do none of these.
The Libertarian message must be radically opposed to all the machinations of the totalitarian regime under which we live. It is not enough to just not advocate for government power; we must be actively anti-statist. While Chase Oliver’s position on “Trans Kids” is notable for the fact that it violates our platform, it is not the worst aspect of his public persona. Mr. Oliver has, over the past decade and a half, carried water for all the regime’s priorities, from “social justice” to the Covid regime. His failures in 2020 to challenge the more egregious seizures of power that the US government has taken in my lifetime disqualify him as our spokesman. Advocating for individuals and businesses to “voluntarily” go along with the instructions of those who enslave us is worse than useless. It is counterproductive, because it casts a stigma on every one of our candidates and personalities who challenge the power of the Global American Empire.
We can all recognize the reality that, in today’s political and cultural climate, our most reliable recruiting is likely to come from “right-wing” Americans. While Donald Trump is an incompetent socialist, the broad faction from which he draws support is much more open to the message of natural rights, personal responsibility, and decentralization than is the progressive, tax-and-spend, pro-regulation “left.” Chase Oliver, however, has little to no appeal for our best recruiting pool, because he, himself, is culturally progressive. What recruiting he does for the Party and the movement will be swiftly lost. We will see little to no long-term gains from his campaign recruiting.
We also know for sure that Chase Oliver will not do anything to advance the cause of “Libertarian Unity.” His team rejected the notion of taking Clint Russell as a Vice Presidential candidate, which Dave Smith rightly noted was the best way to unify the party. We can all recognize the fact that for all its procedural validity, the nomination of Chase Oliver carries little if any moral weight. A substantial portion of the delegation in Washington, DC, was dedicated to sabotaging the convention.
They delayed and prevented business intentionally, as proven by leaked communications from Classical Liberal Caucus leadership (some of whom met to form the Liberal Party the day after the Libertarian National Convention concluded), and as I personally witnessed while sitting near the Texas delegation. They stacked the delegation with improperly seated delegates, then caused further delays as the ongoing bylaws violation they had initiated was fixed via bylaws amendments. They made dilatory motions, points of order, points of personal privilege, and requests for information throughout the convention and particularly on Sunday. Their goal was obvious to everyone on the floor: to delay business so that delegates had to leave and go home, knowing that their faction was less likely to need to leave.
Further, after Round 6 of the Presidential Nomination saw Chase Oliver fail to achieve a majority and set to face off against None of the Above, they spread lies around the floor that gave many delegates the impression that, if Chase Oliver was not nominated, there was no way for the LNC to nominate anyone for President. That falsehood was key to Mr. Oliver’s attainment of 60% of the ballots from those delegates who remained at the convention soon before midnight on Sunday, more than 6 hours after the scheduled close of business.
I am proud to be one of the NOTA 300, and proud of my state of Idaho that everyone in our delegation stood strong in that happy few. I don’t know whether Mr. Oliver would have won the nomination had the convention been free from corruption; it is certainly possible. However, we can be certain of several things:
- Chase Oliver’s nomination is procedurally valid.
- That nomination is morally tainted by corrupt behavior of a large number of delegates at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.
- Several state affiliates have refused, and more will refuse, to place Chase Oliver on their state’s ballot this November.
The Libertarian National Committee has the ability to remove Mr. Oliver as the Nominee and replace him with Mike ter Maat, and to name a successor Vice Presidential Candidate. As officers of the national party, who are responsible for seeing to the long-term health of this party and this movement, I believe it is your duty to do so.